To think disruptive behaviour in schools is out of hand?

Well as an ex-grammar school girl, I agree entirely! I think AI will have a huge impact on professional/office roles, and those on a more practical path should be supported and encouraged from a young age.

I may have a skewed view as a SEN parent, but there would still be increasing numbers of children who would not thrive in either environment. There has been an explosion in ND diagnoses, the reasons for which are not entirely clear. A proportion of those ND children would still need a specialist setting with small classes and high staff numbers to access learning. My son is now 1:1 with a trusted staff member, but has been 2:1 in the recent past. It is these needs (and the associated costs), rather than practical vs. academic children, “feral” vs. well-behaved children, that seems to be causing much of the conflict in the state school learning environment.

I honestly believe that there are hundreds of thousands of pupils for whom education post 14+ is a waste of everyone's time and energy. And keeping them in school post 14+ just turns into a frustrating crowd control exercise for everyone involved.

The kids do not want to be there. They have reached their capacity for learning. They're bored and resentful and no one in their families or social circle place any value on school or education. You might as well try and teach a fish to ride a bicycle.

Not new, decades ago I went to a 2000 pupil comprehensive 8 form entry mixed ability school.
It was truly awful yet it was commended in the press and visited from people overseas as demonstrating an innovative approach.
Bullying and bad behaviour was the norm , zero discipline . Constant disruption , so really hard to do any work.

And Children left still unable to read and write properly whilst a very few tried for university.
my DC went private.

Free schools don't have to follow the National Curriculum apart from providing core subjects (English, Maths, Science and some kind of religious education). I suppose Michaela's spread of subjects must be the absolute bare minimum to provide a 'broad and balanced education' which free schools are also meant to do. I personally don't think it sounds either broad or balanced!

Some of it is a failure of communication - different abilities or different preferences/strengths?

and how many ordinary people have by this point saved for private treatment - quite a lot looking at the stats.

i agree, this Labour govt is not Blairite - there’s no listening to what works it very much is the old 70s debate.

But there's a big difference between having a narrow set of choices in your curriculum (which a lot of Michaelaesque schools call 'knowledge rich' or some such) and having a genuine specialism (e.g. 'this is a school for kids who are really passionate about art'). What was absurd about the previous 'specialisms' was that the government asked schools to pick two 'specialisms', i.e. say which two random subjects they'd like a bit more money for.

And yes, Michaeala is a free school.

We could go back to having genuinely different types of schools - one type mainly for the more academic kids and another type for the mainly practical kids. It wouldn't solve all the problems, but the non academic kids wouldn't be quite so bored and disengaged if they were doing mostly practical/active things.

Nail on the head. In no other setting would that kind of thing be remotely acceptable yet school kids, trying their best in comps, for some reason have to put up and shut up!

So what’s the solution? Bringing back asylums, euthanasia, send them up chimneys?

The LA is responsible for all children’s education as a matter of law. There are plenty of things that I would like to see cut back before we start eroding disabled children’s right to be educated. If people want calm and productive state education - and it’s entirely reasonable that they do - they also need to make provision for the children unsuited to mainstream elsewhere (which costs money). It’s not possible to have it both ways. 🤷‍♀️

Politicians of all colours are bogged down by the equality dogma of "one size fits all" comps. They can't admit they're wrong. Not helped by the old "grammar versus sec mod" attitude of the 70s. It's a bit like how they'd bogged down in the health service by the "NHS versus America" mentality with people (politicians included) ignoring that most other countries have a health model in the middle! They're scared stiff of being criticised by changing the status quo by an uniformed majority of the population who fall for it every time. I.e. if a politician suggested "two tier" schooling, they'd get crucified by the "grammar versus sec mod" brigade, again, with people ignoring all the other countries with successful school systems that have different routes for different abilities.

The only reason why we send out children to private school is because of the shit behaviour that isn't dealt with and the inclusion of SEND children that have no business in Mainstream schools (not their fault).

Yet Michaela can get away with only offering a small amount of GCSE subjects.
Not a very "all-round education".
(although is a Michaela a Free School rather than an Academy?)

@Unexpectedlysinglemumif you wouldn’t want this at work why should children have no choice but accept it?

The specialisms were always a mirage though. Basically they served a function in allowing schools to access some funding by saying they were going to have a 'specialism' in drama, PE, science whatever. For some schools, that paid for some nicer facilities for those subjects, which was a good thing. But it didn't ever equate to actually specialising afaik, as the schools still had to supply the same all-round education.

Local Authorities don't have the funding for it, so there's no point in pretending they do. Or operating as thought they do.

They evolved from the CTCs (City Technology Colleges) which were a Tory idea but Labour came up with the Academy system and almost all the CTCs have converted to Academies.
In theory they are meant to be comprehensive schools but as CTCs/Academies originally all had a specialism then they really weren't all suitable for every child.
The specialism thing seems to have mostly died out so maybe it's correct that Labour want schools to all be comps 🤔

Imagine sharing an office with a colleague who might, at any time, start screaming obscenities and throw a chair across the room or destroy a couple of days worth of your work or smash up your laptop. And then they get rewarded with more time off than you and no expectation to do the work that you have to do. You are expected to live with that every single day, sometimes for years, and never mention it because that would be "unkind". How would you feel about that?

They were only meant to be for failing LA schools though and all other schools to stay as comps

The Academy system was bought in under Labour.
Academies originally were meant to be an alternative to "bog standard comps".
(Now they've just become "bog standard academies" instead)

It's only Labour who are now wedded to the 1 size fits all comprehensive system. Most other parties have moved on from that.

It’s been obvious to me for about 5 years that we need to support a bigger range of schools. I wish it was obvious to politiicans…

I agree with the poster upthread that private schools aren't stricter than state schools. They just have a less "challenging" demographic on the whole. Parents who can pay for their kids' education aren't keen on dehumanising "zero tolerance" environments. They don't see that sort of experience as being useful and beneficial for their children. Instead, while most do expect a calm environment and for their child and others to follow the rules, there is also an expectation that their child will be happy, engaged, respected as an individual and treated with good humour, fairness and kindness.

I'm always a bit sceptical of people who say strict rules and zero tolerance are the solution to the discipline and other problems that schools face. If they're so good for kids, why don't private schools take this approach? I'd be surprised to find that any private school across the country is putting kids in detention for forgetting a pen or the wrong colour socks.

The issues that schools face nowadays centre in many cases around an avalanche of unmet needs, combined with a criminal lack of resources. When you add increased social deprivation together with the problems caused by access to social media etc., it's not surprising that many teachers and schools are struggling.

I’m coming around to this point of view too. I have always been a supporter of comprehensive education but I find it more and more apparent that it is broken.

I have every sympathy with the sentiment, but it doesn’t sit comfortably alongside the average LA’s modus operandi when the disruptive child has additional needs (as they mostly do). Strategically, the LA wants to leave the child where s/he is as long as possible in the hope that parents give up before any money needs to be spent. The LA’s appoint the virtually unemployable as EHCP case workers: it takes them a week just to switch their laptops on (when they are not off sick) and any documentation they produce is hopeless. This is not an accident - it is strategic.

I would have been ecstatic if my disruptive child had been moved to a suitable place as soon as it became clear his AN made him unsuitable for mainstream. Had I removed him from school myself, we’d probably still be waiting. As it was, I passed out my SEN case worker’s details to teachers, SENco’s and other parents encouraging them to complain about DS being in a totally unsuitable environment. There was nothing I could do other than keep sending him in.

Part of the problem is that SEN places have not kept up with demand, meaning more parents have to push for costlier independent SEN provision. My son’s specialist school costs about £100k per year per pupil. That’s a lot of council tax, and the spend is only going to go up. It’s also the reason for inclusion being trumpeted at all costs, and flying in the face of the evidence of many peoples’ eyes and ears. The reality is that inclusion is cheaper and therefore must be defended at all costs.

I laughed at a PP’s comment about the broom cupboard. DS actually spent a whole academic year being taught 1:1 in a cupboard, to keep other children and staff safe from his meltdowns, and the LA still insisted he was just fine in mainstream.

Yep and that's exactly the reason we went independent for secondary. I was not having my DD as a behaviour manager of other children